Theological Ethics in a Neoliberal Age: Confronting the Christian Problem with Wealth

By Kevin Hargaden and William T. Cavanaugh

Throughout his ministry, Jesus spoke frequently and unabashedly on the now-taboo subject of money. With nothing good to say to the rich, the New Testament--indeed the entire Bible--is far from positive towards the topic of personal wealth. And yet, we all seek material prosperity and comfort. How are Christians to square the words of their savior with the balances of their bank accounts, or more accurately, with their unquenchable desire for financial security? While the church has developed diverse responses to the problems of poverty, it is often silent on what seems almost as straightforward a biblical principle: that wealth, too, is a problem. By considering the particular context of the recent economic history of Ireland, this book explores how the parables of Jesus can be the key to unlocking what it might mean to follow Christ as wealthy people without diluting our dilemma or denying the tension. Through an engagement with contemporary economic and political thought, aided by the work of Karl Barth and William T. Cavanaugh, this book represents a unique and innovative intervention to a discussion that applies to every Christian in the Western world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Oct 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532655029

Kevin Hargaden

Kevin Hargaden is the Social Theologian at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice in Dublin, Ireland. He is the editor of Beginnings: Interrogating Stanley Hauerwas (2017) and (with Brian Brock and Nick Watson) Theology, Disability and Sport: Social Justice Perspectives (2018).

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Theological Ethics in a Neoliberal Age

Confronting the Christian Problem with Wealth

Kevin Hargaden

Foreword by William T. Cavanaugh

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Theological Ethics in a Neoliberal Age

Confronting the Christian Problem with Wealth

Theopolitical Visions

24

Copyright ©

2018

Kevin Hargaden. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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Cascade Books

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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-5500-5

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-5501-2

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-5502-9

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Hargaden, Kevin, author.

Title: Theological ethics in a neoliberal age : confronting the Christian problem with wealth / Kevin Hargaden.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books,

2018

| Series: Theopolitical Visions

24

| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers:

isbn 978-1-5326-5500-5 (

paperback

) | isbn 978-1-5326-5501-2 (

hardcover

) | isbn 978-1-5326-5502-9 (

ebook

)

Subjects: LCSH: Political theology. |Neoliberalism. | Finance—Ireland.

Classification:

bt83 .59 h40 2018 (

print

) | bt83 .59 (

ebook

)

All Scripture quotations, unless noted otherwise, are from the New International Version (UK) Bible.

Notice about the use of the Eavan Boland poem with credit to Carcanet for usage in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, WW Norton for the rest of the world.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

10/24/18

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Réamhrá

Bealach Isteach

The Path of the Argument

Chapter 1: We’re All Neoliberal Now

Introduction

Polanyi’s Insight: Locating the Economy

Naming that Location: Neoliberalism

The Neoliberal Subject’s Theological Problem

Neoliberalism as Idolatry

Conclusion: How to Proceed

Chapter 2: Karl Barth and the Parables of Jesus

Introduction

Time and the Kingdom of God

Why Parables, Why Apocalyptic, and Why Barth?

Situating Barth’s Parable Readings: The Rich Young Ruler

The Parable of the Ten Virgins

The Parable of the Talents

The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats

Unruffled Authority, Challenge, and Revolution

What Then Can Be Said?

Chapter 3: Telling Stories About Irish Money

Introduction

A Word on Sources

Parable 1: It Began Off-Shore

Parable 2: Robbing Your Own Bank

Parable 3: Public Protests for a Bankrupt Billionaire

Conclusion

Chapter 4: Rich Worship and the Response to Wealth

Introduction

Possible Alternatives

Making a Meal After the Parables

The Co-opting Power of Capitalism

The Critique of Religion

Preaching that Makes the World New

Conclusion: The Hope of the Life of the World to Come

Afterword

What the Map Excludes

A Final Word on Lament as the Key of Worship

Bibliography

By drawing on the parables, Kevin Hargaden helps us see that in fact Jesus does have some quite straightforward judgments about wealth and its dangers. He combines that analysis with a stunning knowledge of recent economic understanding that gives him an insightful account of the recent crisis in the Irish economy. This is a book that has been begging to be written and now Kevin Hargaden has done it—no mean feat.

—Stanley Hauerwas, author of The Character of Virtue: Letters to 
a Godson (

2018

)

Kevin Hargaden has produced a timely, thoughtful, and provocative work of theological ethics. His critique of neoliberalism is highly original and persuasive. His analysis of the ways in which economic values are embedded in cultural practices is brilliant, allowing the reader to understand why neoliberalism persists, despite all of its woes. A deeply challenging but rewarding read.

—Linda Hogan, Professor of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin

Hargaden’s study is as engaging as it is unsettling precisely because he invites us to consider the theological depth and scope of our ‘money troubles.’ Working creatively at the intersection of ethics, theology, and economics, Hargaden suggests how attending to the new world attested in Jesus’ parables can break open the seeming inevitability of our current economic regimes and animate a worshipful Christian freedom amidst wealth’s captivity.

—Philip G. Ziegler, University of Aberdeen

We live in an age when it seems we can never have enough, for there is always more to desire and obtain. Kevin Hargaden’s book gives us a fantastic opportunity . . . to reflect anew on what wealth means for the people of God. Hargaden skillfully brings together contemporary Irish economic history, Karl Barth’s theology, and a beautiful articulation of worship as a way of creatively reimagining what it means to have enough.

—Jana M. Bennett, University of Dayton, Ohio

Kevin Hargaden is an exciting and prophetic young Irish theological voice, crying out in contemporary idiom and from the heart of the Reformed tradition. His biblical and theological analysis of the problem of wealth is both erudite and provocative . . . which challenges us to resist the hegemony of neoliberalism over our imaginations, and find sources of resistance in the parables of Jesus, theology, and worship.

—Gerry O’Hanlon, SJ, theologian, author, and former Provincial of 
the Irish Jesuits

This book is dedicated with love and gratitude to Claire Catherine Hargaden, without whom, in every sense, it could not exist.

Foreword

At the same time that economics extends its reach into nearly every field of human endeavor, experts from those fields outside of economics who comment on economic matters are told to butt out. Econometrics are peddled as a way to rationalize church-growth strategies, but when Pope Francis critiques the ideology of the free market, he is met with admonitions to mind his own business, which is supposedly the area of life cordoned off into religion. We are repeatedly told that he lacks the requisite expertise, even though he sometimes seems like the only public figure who has something true and sensible to say about economics.

Kevin Hargaden, like Pope Francis, does not worship a god who is only the lord of religion. This book is a call to worship the God of life, all life, the life that happens Monday through Friday, not just the bit that takes place for an hour or so on Sunday morning. That hour is crucial, the focal point of our encounter with the living God, the hour during which we would strap on crash helmets if we really appreciated what was going on, to paraphrase Annie Dillard. But precisely because we are called together during that hour to worship the living God, to encounter the reality that stands at the heart of creation and holds all creation in being, we cannot abandon that creation to other gods. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the God of production, trade, and consumption, which is why the Bible has something to say about harvests and taxes, feasting and fasting. Those who find the details of the Torah puzzling, with its endless instructions for planting trees and sewing garments and cutting hair, should not miss the main point: our God is the God of the material, not merely the spiritual. If religion seems irrelevant to one’s life, it is because religion has been defined too narrowly.

The point of all this is not to divinize economics but to humanize it; if God is God, then money is not. Using concrete examples from the Celtic Tiger—the roaring Irish economy based on speculation, which came crashing to earth in 2008—Kevin Hargaden shows how neoliberal economics can become totalizing, taking on divine pretensions. The island of saints and scholars became a land of buyers and sellers, and neoliberal capitalism became a kind of new, idolatrous religion, replete with its own myths, rites, and disciplines. Hargaden deftly shows how neoliberalism created a new sense of the self, in which people were encouraged to think of themselves as repositories of human capital developing their marketable skills. Debt created a future without any foreseeable rupture, a future without forgiveness and redemption. With a genuine Irish flair for storytelling, Hargaden shows us not only the economic but also the spiritual and human toll that the new religion extracted from his fellow citizens.

To deflate the pretensions of neoliberal economics, Hargaden turns not to some alternative grand revolutionary scheme to remake the world from the top down but to the parables of Jesus, which often touch on matters of economy. Jesus did not advocate burning down the current system and starting over; he was too radical to offer an alternative system or plan to solve all the world’s injustices, as soon as all the right people are killed or coerced. As Hargaden puts it, revelation comes before revolution; Jesus’ parables give people a sense for how to live into the coming kingdom of God through their everyday actions. The revolution that is the kingdom of God does not succeed by coercion. It requires not grand gestures of overhauling the system, but rather the attentiveness of ordinary people to the new things that God is doing in our midst. Jesus’ parables reorient the listener to question the status quo and to attempt more faithful ways of living, building up a new society within the shell of the old.

Jesus’ parables are both universal and adapted to the context in which he lived. What kind of parables would Jesus tell today? Combining a rich theological imagination with a firm grasp of property speculation and debt structuring and tax policy, Hargaden finds the equivalents of the rich young man, the hard master, the unfaithful steward and more in contemporary Ireland. Rooting his analysis in one particular context allows Hargaden to put flesh and blood on the bones of theory; the reader’s attention is held and imagination is kindled by concrete stories of what went wrong in Ireland, in a way that abstract analysis of neoliberalism alone could never do. But the story Hargaden tells, like neoliberalism itself, is universal, extending well beyond Ireland to every part of the globe. Lest we think it can’t happen here, it already has happened and is happening here, though perhaps not as abruptly or dramatically as in Ireland. We might think that the economic crisis of 2008 is now safely behind us, but even if another crash is not imminent, the underlying problems remain. For what went wrong in Ireland is not just the crash but the boom that preceded the crash. This is what makes Hargaden’s book so challenging for us in the rich world. The problem is not just poverty, but wealth, especially the kind of pursuit of wealth that destroys community, turns basic human needs like housing and food into commodities, abandons the common good to private interests, favors owners over workers, turns from care of neighbor to a cosmopolitanism of capital, distorts the human person into a marketable product, and finally turns away from the worship of God to idolatry.

The only thing that will defy this idolatry is worship of the true God. Although Hargaden points toward a multitude of resistances from fresh cooperative ways of engaging in production and trade to Distributism to micro-aggressions against Mammon, the root of any resistance goes back to that hour or so on Sunday morning when communities come together to worship God. Worship, in Hargaden’s wonderful phrase, is the engine-room of reality, the place where God comes to meet us and we become oriented toward the way things really are, shaped into a different kind of social body than the one the powers that be would discipline us into. Hargaden helpfully extends my work on the Eucharist to emphasize preaching (something we Catholics are not exactly known for). Preaching is not about talking to each other or talking to God, but about the Word of God breaking into our world and reorienting us toward the kingdom. It is here that we face the truth that all we have is through grace and that grace is all we have. This liberation from the illusion of our self-sufficiency is the beginning of a liberation theology for the rich.

This is a brilliant and faithful book, and a wonderful read. We are told that theology is otherworldly and economics is concrete, but Hargaden shows that in fact neoliberalism encourages abstraction from the real world, and God calls us back to earth, to attend not to metrics but to the actual joys and sufferings of people. This book illustrates what worshipping an incarnate God looks like.

William T. Cavanaugh

DePaul University

Acknowledgements

This book began life as a PhD thesis at the University of Aberdeen. The first people to acknowledge, therefore, are my supervisors, Brian Brock and Stanley Hauerwas, who shared their wisdom, encouragement, and friendship in a way that has profoundly shaped me. I thank God for their friendship. The wider faculty at Aberdeen, especially Mike Mawson, Mike Laffin, Phil Ziegler, Tom Greggs, and John Swinton were a tremendous encouragement to me. Lisa Evans cannot go unmentioned, since she probably answered more of my dumb questions than everyone else combined.

My fellow students at Aberdeen played a central role in the forming of this argument. I shall forever owe Taido Chino, Declan Kelly, Joey Lear, DJ Konz, Matt Burdette, David Lilley, Allen Calhoun, Andrew Errington, Emily Hill, Ben Paulus, Amy Erickson, Wilson Tan, Joy Allan, and many other friends—most notably Alison, Mer, Hannah, Ruth, and Stephanie—a pint in Six Degrees North and in some instances even a purple Snack bar.

My research in Aberdeen was funded by the National University of Ireland who kindly made me one of their Travelling Students and the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics who made me one of their Transforming Business award holders.

I discovered my love of theology in the church, and so with joy I note the role that the congregations at Maynooth and Lucan have played in my life. In Aberdeen, the ministry of Isaac Poobalan was a balm and back in Dublin, I rely on the wise counsel of Richard Houston. There are many, many, many friends who helped me in diverse ways over the years as I researched and wrote this book. With Cian and Meaigs Synnott and Andrew Stribblehill at the top of that list, I express my gratitude.

These words are written in the lovely office provided to me by the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice. I never anticipated becoming a Christian, never mind a theologian. But it is strangely fitting that this evangelical Presbyterian has been welcomed with such warmth by the Society of Jesus in Ireland. I am grateful especially for the support of my colleagues, most notably John Guiney, SJ.

The extended Hargaden clan have been typically low-key in their enthusiasm for this project, and as a Hargaden, I appreciate that approach. From Iarlaith dismissing any doctor who can’t help a sick tummy to Eamonn and Bríd’s constant affectionate encouragement, I thank my parents, my siblings, my nieces and nephews.

I’ve never been to Eugene, Oregon, but I hope to one day visit and express in person my thanks to the good folk at Wipf and Stock for taking this project on, especially Calvin Jaffarian and Rodney Clapp. I am grateful to Róisín Nic Cóil, Amy Laura Hall, and Martina Madden for their insight as I finalized this text.

Finally, reader, let me tell you about this girl I met twenty years ago. She was sharp and funny and her voice reflected her character, speaking with confidence and clarity and a profound gentleness driven by a love of justice. She introduced me to grace. She argued me into seeing the importance of theology. She left the city she loved and moved near the Arctic Circle and put her vocation on hold to let me think these things through. Most of the good ideas are hers. If you notice a lovely turn of phrase, I probably robbed it from her. Claire remains the reader I most desperately want to impress. Repaying my debt to her is the greatest pleasure a man could have.

As I write these final paragraphs, we are expecting the imminent birth of our first child. The hope of meeting him has been warming me through the months of finishing this project. I hope he reads and enjoys this book some time in the future, but more, my hope is that he will know and enjoy the God who stitched him together with an abundant love, which means he need never listen to the voices of the false gods that whisper that he has to take care of himself because there is not enough to go around.

Réamhrá

Bealach Isteach

In Irish, réamhrá is the word for preamble. Quite literally it means a pre-talk. It suggests a pronouncement is about to begin. It heralds important speech. Who knows whether this introduction meets this lofty standard and rises above the throat-clearing that passes for most of our theology, but what we seek here is bealach isteach, an entrance point, an opening, a means of access. The problem of wealth is complex and we need a way inside, a path to get beyond issues so intricate that we often feel blocked from thinking about them. The purpose of this book is to consider the ethical difficulties that wealth poses to followers of Jesus. In his extensive engagement with concepts around money, profit, and wealth, Jesus appears (at best) ambivalent to the holding of riches. This puts Western Christians, who typically enjoy a material standard of life the like of which is unequalled in human history, in a precarious position.

This problem is, regrettably, not amenable to a simple solution. Jesus can say to one person that they should sell everything and give it to the poor, but Peter seems to keep his fishing boats. If taken crudely, Jesus’s radical generosity can be construed as a form of altruistic trickle-down economics whereby the rich give to the poor, making them slightly less poor, before they give on down the pyramid to those below them, ad infinitum. Jesus’s complex teaching here is clearly not a poverty alleviation scheme. Something deeper is at work at the level of our basic and fundamental desires and convictions. Jesus draws this out when he declares that we cannot love both God and Mammon. Wealth is depicted as a master, or a lord, or an idol whose quiet power can surreptitiously claim our allegiance.¹ When Jesus’s parables subvert the idea of prudent financial management and when his teaching advocates for apparently self-defeating economic practices, the conclusion must be drawn that Jesus is pursuing something other than fiscal sobriety amongst his followers.

Thus, the oft-quoted words of Paul in 1 Timothy, that it is the love of money that is the root of evil, is not a loophole that liberates the conscience of the rich Christian. Rather, it is an acceleration of our complication. Under the surface of the destructive effects of wealth, or the corrosive consequences of capitalism, there lies an idolatrous commitment to a force and a power that is not God, which in Jesus’s teaching is presented as anti-God. To help unravel what it means to be wealthy Christians in the West, we must find a way to examine the weave that Mammon snakes around us in our daily lives. We need a way inside the hold that wealth has on us.

This book, then, intends to be a constructive work of Christian ethics that presents a theological analysis of wealth, and by reference to the parables, charts an alternative approach to being rich and following Jesus. It takes as its subject matter the recent economic history of the Republic of Ireland. I began thinking about these problems when members of the church I was pastoring shared their own struggles with reconciling their wealth with their faith. During the Celtic Tiger their salaries kept rising and the troubling words of Jesus about money persisted, largely avoided in ecclesial speech. With the crash in 2008 this problem did not go away. Although economic hardship was widespread and often severe, relative and objective wealth remained a lived reality.

Ireland is an interesting microcosm in which to consider neoliberal capitalism. An island nation, the economic vitality of which relies on open trading, Ireland has been one of the most remarkable beneficiaries of the form of capitalism that has emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and since 2008, one of its most striking victims.² The insights gathered by considering a peripheral island on the Atlantic edge of Europe can be scaled to other Western settings because of the common assumptions and practices at play through capitalism. The universal begins with the parochial, and so the relatively tangential dramas of boom and bust that afflicted Ireland nonetheless have relevance for other places and other peoples, at the very least as a cautionary tale. ³

Ireland won its independence in 1922 after a prolonged battle with British forces and a relatively brief civil war. The island was partitioned into two regions. Northern Ireland was made up of six of the nine counties that constituted the ancient province of Ulster. It continued to be part of the United Kingdom. The remaining twenty-six counties were brought together under a Dublin-based government that functioned as a dominion of the British Empire.⁴

Recovering from the Civil War and establishing the structures that would sustain independence was the central concern of the early years of the Dáil (the Irish parliament) and no major shift in economic policies was envisioned or attempted. In the words of the economist Cormac Ó’Gráda, the first government made virtues of continuity and caution.⁵ The economic policy flowed out of the triumphant political nationalism of the era.⁶ Self-sufficiency was the goal. Internal industrial development would be fostered by agricultural exports. Patrick Hogan, the Minister for Agriculture, is reported as describing the economic policy as one of helping the farmer who helped himself and letting the rest go to the devil.⁷ Neutrality in World War II was of a piece with Irish economic isolationism; by the time war broke out in Europe, Ireland had over 2,000 protective trade measures in place.⁸

This policy changed decisively in the late 1950s. In the face of a stagnant economy, rampant unemployment, and massive emigration, a concerted shift to a more open, export-led trading economy was initiated. Ireland reformed its education system, opened its markets, actively courted foreign investment, tailored tax law to encourage commerce, and set itself on a trajectory to join the emerging European Economic Community.⁹

After years of modest growth, these measures seemed to yield a dramatic harvest in the mid-1990s. In one year alone, 1994, the Irish economy grew by almost a tenth, 50,000 people were added to the work force, and unemployment plummeted.¹⁰ The growth continued and continued. The development came to be known as the Celtic Tiger.¹¹ Clinch, Convery, and Walsh capture the national feeling of felicity when, writing in 2000, they compare the Celtic Tiger to receiving an unexpected but welcome baby.¹² This surprise matured into a tentative expectation that things could stay this way forever. We can see this as early as 2004, when Tom Garvin comments on how in the current literature, despite the spectacular growth of the 1990s, an underlying disquiet seems to resurface from time to time, as though these good times could not last.¹³ That the disquiet was only occasional represents a phenomenal transformation in Irish self-understanding.

Yet these times were indeed coming to an end. The global economy twice went into recession at the turn of the millennium, first with the dot-com crash and then in the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks in America. During this period, Ireland’s growth was sustained. However, the underlying economic activity had shifted towards property speculation. All the data remained positive through the subsequent years—the government returned surpluses, there was full employment (which, in one of the many confusing aspects of capitalism, still means that there is some unemployment), wages were rising, investment was flooding in—but it was all largely driven by the buying and selling of buildings. Warnings of a global financial panic were sounded in 2007 but went unheeded in Ireland.¹⁴ When the New York-based investment bank Lehmann Brothers went bankrupt in September 2008, the consequences in Ireland were swift. Within weeks, all six Irish banks were drained of liquidity and were quickly approaching the point of insolvency. The Irish government stepped in with a blanket bank guarantee, assuming that the roaring Tiger had the muscle to fight its way out of a tight spot.¹⁵ Their assumption was wrong.

The bank guarantee was to cost many billions more than the Irish State’s annual budget. The construction industry stalled as the property bubble burst. Tax-takes dwindled. Unemployment rose. The country went into a steep depression, adopted austerity economics, and yet still, two years later, in autumn 2010, it needed to call for a bailout from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union.¹⁶ That process lasted four years. Now, a decade on from the collapse, many of Ireland’s economic metrics have recovered, but the scars of austerity abound.

The wealth that was accumulated so rapidly through the boom remains relevant in the aftermath. Ireland is still firmly a first-world country, with standards of living comparable to other Western countries. While that wealth is spread with an injurious inequality and while the years of austerity have disproportionately afflicted the impoverished, the sick, the disabled, the young, and the old, the political imagination that gave rise to the Celtic Tiger, still holds sway.¹⁷ The shattering experience of the 2008 crash has not prompted a re-examination of the desires and policies that brought the crash to bear. Instead, Ireland is as consumed with the pursuit of wealth in its bust as it was in its boom. The need for a theological analysis is as pertinent as ever.

The Path of the Argument

The course of this theological analysis will run as follows: In chapter 1, we will situate our study of wealth in terms of the concrete arrangements that generate it. Ireland’s political and economic commitments lie firmly within the domain of what has come to be known as neoliberal capitalism. The goal in this chapter is to get under the surface of political rhetoric about free markets and globalization, to consider the ways in which economic values are embedded in cultural practices. Only when this is established can we properly identify the ways in which neoliberal capitalism might pose a theological problem for Christians.

In chapter 2, we turn to the parables of Jesus and consider them as apocalyptic narratives that announce and describe the kingdom of God. With the help of Karl Barth’s exegesis, we will begin to see the ways in which in the parables mark out the uncommon sense of the kingdom. In an age when neoliberalism appears to be hegemonic, the parables point to the reality that all time is God’s, and no human system or construct can vie with the lordship of Jesus. This will be established by paying close attention to how Barth reads the three parables of Matthew 25. There we find Jesus as an insistent Lord who subverts even our standard ideas of revolutionary fervor.

Thus, the parables shatter the totalized accounts of neoliberal capitalism. They direct us to another world that is coming and is already here in the kingdom of Jesus. With that in mind, we will return in chapter 3 to the business of real, existing capitalism, but this time we will re-describe the recent economic history of Ireland, which has been alluded to above, through three narratives. These homemade parables will seek to sketch an accurate account of the crash and its aftermath without recourse to the political rhetoric of economic vocabulary. Bypassing the abstractions and obfuscations that so often are used to describe the economy allows us to see the ways in which economic reality impinges on the lives of ordinary people. Theologically, of course, revelation always involves a hiddenness and vice versa, so obfuscation in and of itself is not the issue. Parables stand distinct as a genre, in part, based on their contents, which tease and allude towards a conclusion without stating it. There is a particular form of obfuscation that is presented as if it is transparent because it is objective that is here being interrogated. The abstraction of econometric language obscures while posing as if it has laid things out clearly. Key ethical questions will arise that would be hidden if we were content to settle on the statistical snapshots that usually drive such analyses.

The stage will then be set for the decisively constructive chapter, which will propose worship as a response to the problem of wealth. In the normal course of things, it is in worship that the parables are encountered as God’s word. Worship becomes the site from which a response to wealth can be generated. If Christians in the West come to see the wealth they inherit as a result of neoliberal capitalism as problematic, there are two obvious modes of response. The first approach is to seek to reform the system that is identified as unjust. The second is to seek to withdraw from the corrupt dynamics and craft communities of difference based around some alternative economic logic. Both of these approaches are called into question, and in their place what is proposed is an embrace of worship as a reparative counter-formation that opposes the vagaries of neoliberal